I wish someone would measure the bang-for-the-buck without considering politically correct metrics.
Otherwise, any state university should suffice. A few states have some state schools with very low acceptance rates and difficulty to get in that might serve to advertise/network you better than another state school.
If it’s not hard to get admitted, then just buy the education with the lower price.
Real education covers more than "skills and credentials I need to get a well-paid job."
I'm curious what real education would be that does not impart a skill that others are willing to pay for?
I speak as someone who selected classes based on maximizing skills that would be useful in the career I wanted.
Those are all quite valuable to have in the workplace, but anyone with a bachelors in one of those topics will likely need to get a masters degree in the same field or something else before they can find a decent career.
BTW, there's no need to go to university to learn history. All that's necessary is to read a history book. I read lots of them. Paying someone to lecture you about history seems a waste of time and money. Just read it. Much more time efficient.
Going back to the initial comment you were responding to, I'd add that most degrees will cover things that aren't skills and credentials that will help someone get a job. That may explain why people with CS degrees still have to answer fizzbuzz questions in job interviews.
Whether reading history is more time efficient than taking a class depends a lot on the topic, the writing about it, and the knowledge and abilities of the professor. It's been my experience that a knowledgeable professor can add important context to a topic that will save the student a lot of time and energy.
It isn't equivalent. Very, very few people manage to self-educate advanced math. But it's a lot easier with liberal arts.
Allow me to pose this question - does a literature degree enable one to write best selling books? Does JK Rowling have a degree in literature? In contrast, learning math and engineering enables one to use that knowledge to create great things. One has zero chance of building a successful liquid fuel rocket engine without that training.
I recall reading a lament by a literature professor who said he knew everything there was to know about Romeo and Juliet. He said he'd throw all that knowledge away for the joy of reading it for the first time.
To put it another way: a lot of people actually do recreational math, which is largely self-taught. Maybe less than those who fancy themselves authors but it's still a lot of people. The aren't many people who study to make rockets, but there also aren't many people who end up as journalists or literary critics or copywriters but those people do actually get a degree in liberal arts to do that. Writing best-selling books is akin to being Martin Gardner.
Given what the major newspapers write and the major news networks broadcast, it's quite an indictment of their liberal arts educations.
Reading reviews of the books helps a lot in finding one worth the time reading, as well as looking at lists and reviews of what other books they've written.
Reading multiple books of the same event gives one a lot of perspective, too. I'm currently reading my 4th history book on the D-Day invasion - all quite different.
1. College educated people smoke less on average. This is true regardless of income even though typically less income correlates to more smoking.
2. In poor neighborhoods, when the number of residents without college drops below a certain threshold (like 4 percent maybe), crime skyrockets. The neighborhood stops being merely poor and becomes a dangerous slum.
A liberal arts education is widely scoffed at. There's some joke about what kind of careers different majors lead to and the punchline is that liberal arts major say "Would you like fries with that?" which is shorthand in this day and age for "You will probably be drowning in college debt and a wage slave working to pay off your student loans while living in Mom's basement if you are lucky enough to have supportive parents."
But they are called liberal arts because they are supposed to be liberating. They are supposed to free and empower you to live well and know how to cope effectively with crap life throws at you.
The Clemente Course is intended to be a free liberal arts college education for people living with terrible circumstances like generational poverty or in prison and has been taught in prison. It was founded on the theory that the right kind of education is the antidote to these kinds of intractable problems that routinely fail to be resolved by throwing money at them.
https://www.clementecourse.org/
I homeschooled my twice exceptional sons and a primary goal of mine was making sure my extremely bright but socially challenged children didn't wind up in jail. I provided them a humanities education defined as "learning how to live effectively with the inconvenient, inescapable fact of their own humanity and that of other people."
I'm a huge fan of liberal arts education and my AA is in Humanities. Yes, I'm very well aware it doesn't give you a lot of marketable skills to make bank promptly upon graduation.
I also have a Certificate in GIS from probably the most prestigious GIS program in the world and it promised everyone good salaries in short order which never materialized for me.
I don't regret it and it wasn't a waste of time or money but the historic tendency for college to correlate to good salaries is probably rooted in the fact that until they decided to milk poor people for student loans interest and turn a generation of college graduates into over educated wage slaves, a college degree was a proxy for "Someone with adequate resources and mojo and drive who knows what they want to do."
It wasn't the degree per se that made them successful. They had what it took to get the degree and that correlated strongly to having what it took to establish a serious career that paid well.
A sheepskin is a necessary but insufficient prerequisite for some careers. It's not a guarantee you will succeed though and someone somewhere along the way imagined it was and many people are suffering horribly because of it.
Do any of them even teach free market economics?
"Ninety percent of everything is crap." Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
Try to not throw the baby out with the bath water while sorting this out for your personal edification.
I wasn't rude to you, and rudeness won't bolster your case.
> Just because there are a lot of terrible liberal arts programs doesn't mean it can't be done well.
The difference is that, with a STEM degree, if you design an airplane and it doesn't fly then you're wrong. There's no way to delude oneself into thinking one's design works.
There's no such corrective force with liberal arts.
There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena. It's just not easy.
It's not easy with science either. Plane crashes killed people like some Cthulhu horror tearing planes out of the sky before they realized square windows create stress points when flying at jet speeds which eventually destroy the plane.
People died because of that design flaw and it wasn't immediately obvious why.
I quoted the line you used. Show it to your friends and ask them if they think it is rude or not, without saying you wrote it.
> There are ways to get good data and best practices for social phenomena ... it's not easy with science either
Liberal arts majors are particularly bad at it. I doubt they are even aware of what the scientific method is, or how to implement it. We all know that a survey can get wildly varying results depending on exactly how the questions are worded. I also see plenty of liberal arts surveys that use too few samples to get statistical validity, along with clearly wrong interpretations of the statistics. The lack of statistics being a required course for a liberal arts degree is just another glaring problem with liberal arts programs.
As for the DeHaviland Comet crashes, allow me to clarify. The problem with finding the cause was the airplane would disintegrate at high altitude with no warning, and all there was was a rain of debris. Once they gathered up all the pieces, and reconstructed the airplane from the debris, it was immediately obvious that the fault originated in the window corners, and any structural engineer knew why. They then conducted experiments to confirm it.
The problem was not "jet speeds". It was the pressurization/depressurization cycles from flying up to 30,000 feet and then down, resulting in fatigue damage. Square corners are "stress risers" meaning the stress in a square corner is 3x the stress in the rest of the material. The problem did not occur with propeller airliners because they flew at lower altitudes either unpressurized or with little pressurization.
A fix was devised - make the corners round, and a forged doubler was riveted over it. Then this was also tested, and proved sound. And it works because sound methods of design, analysis, and testing was done.
There is simply no comparison with how these things are done in aviation engineering vs liberal arts.
P.S. My degree is in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Aeronautical/Aerospace, and I did design work on the 757, and have a particular interest in crashes and their causes.